I was looking at a big twisted branch on my pluot tree and realized that it had partially broken and twisted. It seems to me that it probably did it at the same time another branch broke off last year. I had found the branch that broke off last summer when it fell. The branch I was now looking at had almost completely repaired itself. But it was now, sort of rotated about 80 degrees and pointed at the ground. Imagine if standing you had your arm bent slightly and reaching up. Then it broke at your bicep and your hand rotated down about 80 degrees.
The reason the one I had found earlier broke off was the weight of the fruit it had on it last summer. So that’s probably the reason the second one broke as well.
In thinking about that, I wondered if the amount of fruit on a tree might be a wonderful way for the tree to determine how fast it was growing. In other words how good life was.
Now from the tree’s perspective if it is growing extremely well and therefore has a massive amount of fruit on its limbs, probably it has happened to find an extremely good place to be growing. Or maybe its neighbors have suffered a calamity and given it more air, room, and light . So don’t you think it would make sense for the tree to have actually evolved to crack and break its branches and let them sag down into the soil where they would quickly, and with no need to change its genetics, start a new copy of itself? And also to only do this if life was really really good!
Many, many plants can start copies of themselves by developing roots on branches that have come into contact with the soil. This would allow a tree that had found a great spot to reproduce itself much faster than by seed (what most people assume is the only reason for the fruit). Air layering a branch or even starting a cutting generally generates a tree much quicker than from a seed. Maybe there are multiple reasons to have fruit in the first place and also a complex interaction between the strength of a branch and the size of the fruit and the number of potential genetic changes in the offspring (number of fruit).
Trees have had years, and years, and years, and years, and unfathomable years, to perfect little fun genetic tricks like that. And I’ll bet there are thousands of little tricks that they use. Whether the one just hypothesized is among them, who knows. But it was fun thinking about, and I hope you have had fun thinking about it too.